


The Good Place

by whichstiel



Series: Season 13 Codas [10]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Dreamwalking, Episode: s13e09 The Bad Place, Gen, Substance Abuse, The Bad Place, spn 13x09
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-12-09
Updated: 2017-12-09
Packaged: 2019-02-12 13:12:13
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12959931
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/whichstiel/pseuds/whichstiel
Summary: The Bad Place wasn't always bad.





	The Good Place

There's something about dreamwalking that makes the visions take root in the walker's soul. The visions become a part of the dreamwalker, like murals on a wall. Each walk is a new layer of paint. Over time, over many years, the layers of paint will grow thicker than the wall itself. If you slice at it, the layers are all there like countable tree rings. And just like tree rings, those dreamwalks tell a story.

Kaia didn't remember much from before she was three, except for this. Spinning leaves overhead turned the bright sunshine into a riotous disco. She screwed up her face at this green and gold display. It's warm and earthy and a sudden enough change from her night-shadowed crib to warrant remembering. She's lying somewhere soft and close, and plants tickled her bare feet and ears. There's a gasp from above her and a slow, soft hand trailed along the curve of her cheek. That was her first memory of the Good Place.

She visited this place many times. It was always half shadow, half light, and smelled like green, growing things and water hanging in the air like a waiting breath. There's always someone to greet her. When she was a baby, there were arms to cradle her. When she grew older her visits were met with smiles and games. Kaia remembered their smile, how the world seemed to brighten with its welcome. She returned home to stir in her bed with the sounds of the woods still ringing in her ears.

There was a house there, once. It was a small hut built from lashed bamboo and cozied into a grove of thick trees. Sunshine worked its way in through the canopy and kissed the small garden where she always seemed to appear. The garden was like a dream unto itself, full of strange plants that gasped open when she touched them, and impossibly red berries.

Kaia told her mother about the dreams when her mother needled her about her darkening skin. She told her about the hyperreality of visiting a world lit by another sun. She told her mother about the other person who treasured her visits. Her mother patted her on the head and told her in no uncertain terms that nothing she saw was real and that it was best to focus on the waking world – and to please stay out of the sun in the future. Kaia didn't talk about her dreams of the Good Place after that.

And then the calamity happened. One night when she was eleven Kaia drifted off to sleep with a smile on her lips, ready to visit her friend. They'd been in the middle of a game of strategy played with small whittled discs and Kaia was winning for the first time in a year. She arrived in the world as she always did, with a body-shocking gasp as though she'd traveled airless to reach the small grove. Instead of the quiet garden, however, she saw chaos.

The swaying canopy of trees was destroyed, leaving a starkly bright clearing that easily illuminated the destruction around her. Splinters of wood and shredded leaves carpeted the forest floor. The garden had a deep furrow that ran almost the entire width of it, as a though a giant had picked up a stick and run it through the earth like a plow. The house was gone, bamboo scattered like spilled toothpicks over the ground. “Ayan?” she cried out to her friend. “Ayan!” But her friend didn't answer. She stood in the destroyed garden and stared around her in horror and shock. She was still standing there when the dream snapped her back to her body. When she woke that night, it was to a pillow wet with tears.

The next evening Kaia chased the dreams again. Surely there had been a mistake. Maybe she had experienced a real nightmare instead of a visit this time. But when she arrived, reliable as clockwork, there was no house, no nothing. Instead there was a new smell in the air that made her clap her hands over her nose and breathe through her mouth. The smell was sweet and she recognized it from a dead squirrel she'd once found at the edge of the yard. “Ayan,” she whispered, and began to search for the body.

From there it only grew worse as though every moment of joy she'd reaped from dream travel came back to her threefold as death and despair.

The next night she refused to sleep, but she was young and sleep found her as she sat up against her headboard staring desperately into the lamplight to stay awake. The stench was still there and Kaia stumbled away from it all – away from the ruined garden and the ruined body that lay buried in the wreckage. She curled at the base of a tree and wrapped her arms tightly around her legs. Kaia closed her eyes and tried to will herself to wake up.

A snarl from the wooded gloom stopped her breath. As she watched, a beast curled into the clearing. It was like nothing she'd ever seen before, low and rippling along the ground. It's many jointed limbs clambered easily over the felled trees and it snuffled loudly as though following the scent of decay. It nosed its way towards the destroyed garden and the sunlight caught its feathers so that they shone as brightly as blood and stone. She snapped back to her quiet bedroom just as the beast began to tear into the flesh of her friend. The sound of flesh ripping like thick fabric followed her into the waking world like a hovering ghost.

The beasts didn't stop coming, and Kaia couldn't stop going. She began to return to her bed bloody. She spent her waking hours concealing wounds, seeing doctors, and dissolving into a formless mass of fear and exhaustion. Kaia fought it. She fought the dreams and the monsters, her parents and the banality of the waking world. Kaia fought until the Good Place was a distant memory. She fought until the Good Place became just a cosmic joke from a cruel god. She fought until the dreams building up on her skin became thicker than her own flesh and bone.

Now she taps the needle. Inspects the tip. The layers of dreams crackle as she moves and she picks at them to find her way to her vein. Soon her body will dissolve and what is left will be a shell of memories where her body once stood. As the drugs swirl into her system Kaia wonders what will happen when she dies in the dream. Perhaps she will be reborn as a monster in that distant world. She'll live in the shadowed trees and fill her mouth with flesh. She'll become a story, a painting on a wall left behind to ignite the curiosity of somebody far away into the future, in another world. There are worse fates than death; she's living proof of that. Kaia stares down at her arm, the needle dropping from her fingers. Her flesh dissolves into light so insubstantial that nothing should be able to grasp it. The dream takes her anyway. The dream always takes her anyway.

Kaia walks.

**Author's Note:**

> I'm sorry I keep writing mournful things, my dudes. On the bright side, I have something fairly silly coming up for SPN Holiday Mixtape this month.
> 
> Thanks for reading! I'm on [Twitter](https://twitter.com/whichstiel) and [Tumblr](http://whichstiel.tumblr.com/) @ whichstiel. You may also like the Supernatural recap and gif blog I co-write/curate, [Shirtless Sammy](https://shirtlesssammy.tumblr.com/).


End file.
